Journal of Persianate Studies 2 (2009) 210-236 brill.nl/jps Accounting for Diff erence: A Comparative Look at the Autobiographical Travel Narratives of Hazin Lāhiji and ʿAbd-al-Karim Kashmiri Mana Kia Harvard University Abstract Th is paper examines the mid-eighteenth century historical memoir of Mohammad Ali Hazin Lāhiji and the auto-biographical travel narrative of ʿAbd al-Karim Kashmiri as a way to under- stand a shared tradition of cultural conceptions and textual borrowing, even in the midst of diff erent attributions of historical meaning and valuations within that culture. Hazin often serves as an iconic fi gure, representative of the changing relationship between Iran and Hindustan in the eighteenth century. Reading Hazin’s memoir in relation to Kashmiri’s travels with Nadir Shah’s army from Delhi to Iran on his way to hajj problematizes this dominant reading. Under- neath diverging and sometimes confl icting claims in these texts, history is represented in a way that evinces similar ideas of home, country, and ideal political rule in the context of travel and exile. Keywords Hazin, Kashmiri, fall of the Safavids, Indian travelers to Iran, Nadir Shah’s invasion of India, Persian culture Shaikh Mohammad ʿAli Lāhiji (1692-1766), known as Hazin, was born in Isfahan and spent almost three decades of his life seeking knowledge, an activ- ity that entailed a great deal of travel. Educated by the luminaries of Isfahan and Shiraz, he lost most of his family and wealth in the Afghan invasion. After- wards, he traveled incessantly in western and central Iran, Mesopotamia, and Arabia, never remaining in one place for more than a couple of years. His alleged involvement in the assassination of Nāder Shah’s governor in Lar resulted in his voyage to Hindustani domains in 1734.1 He spent various periods of time 1 I use the term Hindustan because it is the term my sources use to refer to the kingdom ruled by the Mughals, a geographical reference to central north India that was the seat of that empire; it provides distinction from the modern colonial geographical concept of the Indian subcontinent or the nation-state evoked by the word ‘India.’ For the same reasons I use the term Iran instead of Persia, referring specifi cally to former Safavid domains, which cover some regions now part of other © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/187470909X12535030823814 M. Kia / Journal of Persianate Studies 2 (2009) 210-236 211 in Sindh and the Punjab, particularly in Lahore. After a notorious decade in Delhi, where he alienated many political and literary elites, Hazin resettled in Benares in the year of the Mughal emperor Mohammad Shah’s death (1748) and lived out the rest of his days there.2 Scholars generally foreground Hazin’s denigration of all things Hindustani, yet his memoir, Tazkerat al-ahvāl, deals with Hindustan in less than a fi fth of the text. Often overlooked is that most of Hazin’s memoir is concerned with and structured by the fall of the Safavid state and the rise of Nāder Shah in the ensuing turbulence.3 Th e memoir narrates a life of travels, deeply intertwined with the historical events of its time, which is ultimately a text of involuntary migration, a representation of a life lived ethically, in spite of the cruelties of fate and the pain of exile. ʿAbd-al-Karim Kashmiri (d. 1784), a resident of Delhi at the time of Nāder Shah’s conquest of the city in 1739, accompanied Nāder’s army back to Iran via Transoxiana, in service as a functionary (motasaddi).4 He parted ways with Nāder’s army in Qazvin in 1741 and in the company of ‘Alavi Khan, who had joined the army in Delhi as Nāder’s head physician (hakim-bāshi), made his way to the Iraqi shrine cities and then onto Hejaz to perform hajj. He returned to Hindustan via a ship to Bengal in 1742 and settled in Delhi. Bayān-e Vāqeʿ (hereafter, Bayān) provides an account of the high politics of Mughal domains from a Delhi-based, Mughal-centric perspective.5 Th e text circulated widely in Persian and English language circles, as evinced by multiple Persian manu- script copies in India, Iran, and Britain and its translation into English soon after the text’s completion.6 Bayān is primarily a history, with an autobiographical nation-states. I use the term Persian in a much broader cultural sense. In this paper, there are both Irāni and Hindustani Persians, though the majority of literate people were at least bilingual. 2 He was revered as a saint by local people during his life and afterwards (Khatak, pp. 101-04, 116-17). On Hazin’s life and work, see Khatak and Shafi ʿi-Kadkani. 3 Most monographs draw on the text as a source of factual information, but do not engage critically with the source itself. As they are mining the text for facts, their main concern is the reliability of the information within, not its meaning. See Lockhart; Axworthy; Tucker. 4 Little is know of Kashmiri’s early life. Since forty-fi ve years lapse between Nāder’s invasion and Kashmiri’s death, it is unlikely that he was older than his mid-thirties. For more on Kash- miri, see Shafi ʿ. 5 Alam and Subrahmanyam note that the section of the text from the death of Mohammad Shah in 1748 is likely written by Mohammad Bakhsh, also known as Āshub, an early copyist and admirer of Kashmiri (289-90). I have treated the text as a single entity because this is the form in which the text circulated and my analysis does not depend on unitary authorship of the text. Th e text, as outlined by Kashmiri in the introduction, was to have a diff erent ending that Kash- miri never provided. Instead, Āshub continued to add the events of high Mughal politics in an ongoing fashion. Each manuscript seems to have ended at a diff erent date in the late eighteenth and even early nineteenth century. Th e published version I have quoted from in this chapter ends in 1193/1779. 6 Th e shoddy English translation by Francis Gladwin, Th e Memoirs of Khoja Abdulkurreem, 212 M. Kia / Journal of Persianate Studies 2 (2009) 210-236 travel narrative of pilgrimage (hajjnāma) nested within. A detailed overview of the work has been provided elsewhere (Alam and Subrahmanyam, pp. 247- 90). Kashmiri’s account is drawn from his own observations, buttressed by past written histories (such as Hazin’s), and orally transmitted information of contemporaries he deemed reliable, such as ʿAlavi Khan, Mirzā ʿAli Akbar (in whose service he was) and others of Nāder’s entourage (Lockhart, p. 301). Hazin’s text, whose historical account of the fall of the Safavids and Nāder Shah’s rise Kashmiri draws from, is also made up of oral and written accounts of others, in addition to his own. Both texts incorporate accounts from Iranian and Hindustani informants, making it somewhat diffi cult to call either text a discrete view of Iran or Hindustan, as if such things were mutually exclusive. Th ese texts are the products of multiple regionally diverse voices, edited and mediated by their respective authorial voices but not reducible to them.7 Scholars often interpret Hazin’s views of India as a representative form of Iranian proto-nationalism, assuming a modern, anachronistic signifi cation of what Iran, and being from Iran, means.8 Hazin’s view of Hindustan as iconic of something identifi able as an “Iranian” view of Hindustan is grossly over- signifi ed. Moreover, it obfuscates overlapping ideas of exile, home and the importance of specifi c historical events to the changing shape of Persianate culture, which for the Iranians of the fi rst half of the eighteenth century was the fall of the Safavid state.9 Th ough relations do change between Irāni and was published in Calcutta (1788, 1812) and London (1793). Gladwin excludes the fi rst section (bāb) on the fall of the Safavids, the rise of Nāder Shah and his invasion of Hindustan, as well as the events occurring after the death of Mohammad Shah. Th e sections pertaining to the politics of Hindustan after Kashmiri’s return are also greatly abridged. Th e better translation is by Fran- cis Pritchard, in manuscript form at the British Museum (Add. 30,782). Th e early date of this translation is likely due to the English (and European) fascination with Nāder Shah, as Kash- miri’s text was primarily understood to be a history of the invasion and the weakening of Hindustan. 7 We cannot assume that the narrative self-representation is equivalent to Hazin’s subjective identity. Even in post-romantic Euro-American contexts, reading an autobiographical text as the straightforward refl ection of the individual author is problematic. See de Man, pp. 920 f. 8 Alam and Subrahmanyan call Hazin “a later grumbler” and link certain expressions and attitudes in his text to ones written by travelers from Iran to Hindustan, the Deccan and Th ai- land decades and even centuries earlier, erasing generic specifi cities and wider authorial and textual contexts (2007, pp. 175-242). Th ey present this “Iranian” view of Hindustan as a type of Orientalism, a concept adopted from Cole. 9 Some scholars point to the lack of patronage for poets caused by the decline of central Mughal power, but lack of patronage is part of a broader set of events. Th e changing stakes of migration were also aff ected by their contexts of origin. Th e importance of the fall of the Safavids explains the particularly acute lamentations of home and exile resulting from a loss of home in the temporal, not just geographical sense.